How Quickly She Disappears Read online

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Raymond Fleischmann

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  BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  “Except” copyright © 1998 by Wendell Berry, from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Fleischmann, Raymond, author.

  Title: How quickly she disappears / Raymond Fleischmann.

  Description: New York : Berkley, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019019798| ISBN 9781984805171 (hardback) | ISBN 9781984805195 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Twin sisters--Fiction. | Missing persons--Fiction. | Women--Crimes against--Fiction. | Alaska--Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Suspense. | FICTION / Crime. | FICTION / Literary. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction. | Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3606.L45275 H69 2020 | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019019798

  First Edition: January 2020

  Jacket art: mountains by Andrew Merry/Getty Images; northern lights © plainpicture/Design Pics/Composite Image photography

  Jacket design and composite by Emily Osborne

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Madeline, of course

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part 1Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part 2Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Part 3Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Now that you have gone

  and I am alone and quiet,

  my contentment would be

  complete, if I did not wish

  you were here so I could say,

  “How good it is, Tanya,

  to be alone and quiet.”

  “Except” by Wendell Berry

  PART

  1

  CHAPTER 1

  July 1941

  The rattling buzz of a bush plane awoke her that morning and, as it just so happened, Elisabeth had been dreaming of her sister.

  She had been back at her childhood home in Lititz, Pennsylvania. Like all of the dreams about her sister, Elisabeth imagined Jacqueline as she was when she was eleven years old, when they were eleven years old, 1921, the year that Jacqueline disappeared forever.

  But beyond the broadest details—her sister’s sad eyes; the vast, creaking farmhouse; the clattering stalks of corn that surrounded their yard like an interminable forest—the rest of the dream was lost to Elisabeth as soon as she opened her eyes, that distant world and all its distant comfort obliterated by a postal plane grinding through the sky on its way into town.

  Wait, Elisabeth thought, blinking sleep away. Oh, yes.

  She was back in Alaska—Tanacross, Alaska, a village with a population of eighty-five people. About two hundred miles southeast of Fairbanks, Tanacross was a place so far from Pennsylvania that it sometimes felt like a different world.

  Elisabeth sat up, one hand sweeping through her hair. Her husband, John, had been away at a seminar in Juneau for almost a week, and she never slept soundly without him, purely out of habit. And then there was the light, that ceaseless summer light. In Alaska in July, the sun hardly ever went away. More often than not, Elisabeth’s nights were filled with dreams: sometimes about her sister; sometimes nonsense; sometimes music, just music, an indistinct melody playing in circles. No matter the dream, she rarely slept well in the summertime. They had been living in Alaska for three years, and each passing summer had been more difficult than the last.

  “Mama, are you awake?”

  Margaret was standing in the frame of the bedroom’s open door. She was dressed in the cotton nightgown that Elisabeth had made for her last Christmas. Glinting white light shined through the windows beside the bed, and Margaret’s blond hair and pale skin made her look like a ghost. She looked, Elisabeth thought, very much like she and Jacqueline had looked when they were eleven years old, the same age that Margaret was now.

  “Yes, honey, I’m awake,” Elisabeth said. “I’m sitting up, aren’t I?”

  Margaret padded across the room. “I thought you might be a somnambulist,” she said, hopping up onto the bed. Margaret leaned back against Elisabeth, collapsing into her arms like a happy cat.

  “I might have thought the same about you,” Elisabeth said, smiling, pulling her close. She glanced at her wristwatch on the nightstand. It was five fifteen in the morning. “What are you doing up so early? Studying your vocabulary?”

  “No, I memorized everything last night. I’ve already . . .” Margaret paused, tugging at a loose button on her gown. “I’ve already learned all the requisite words.”

  “I can tell.” Elisabeth leaned closer to the top of Margaret’s head. Her daughter smelled like sleep: musty yet also vaguely sweet. “From what I hear,” Elisabeth added, “I’m sure you’ll do very well on your test. You always do.”

  That she did. Though Margaret was just eleven years old, she acted and read well beyond her age. Since moving to Alaska, Elisabeth and John had educated her themselves, at home, and Margaret took to everything they taught her with a speed and retention that was sometimes shocking. She eschewed Nancy Drew for H. G. Wells, traded toys for books of logic problems. For Christmas, in addition to the nightgown, Elisabeth and John had given her the first three letters of an encyclopedia series, a massive book that she read from one
cover to the other as if it were a novel.

  Tilting back her head, Margaret looked up at her. “Was that Mr. Glaser’s plane?”

  “Probably,” Elisabeth said. “He’s supposed to come by today. He’s awfully early, though.”

  “He woke me up.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Will he have my book?”

  For weeks, Margaret had eagerly awaited the arrival of a science book Elisabeth had bought through a catalogue. It contained instructions for thirty different experiments that children could conduct at home. Baking soda and vinegar became volcanic lava; paper clips defied all logic and floated on water; vegetable oil and club soda mixed to make an alien sea, its waters churning with fluorescent yellow globules. Once a week, the post office delivered mail, groceries, clothing, books, and medical supplies—anything they ordered, though certain requests took longer than others. They had sent for Margaret’s book six weeks earlier.

  “Maybe he’ll have it,” Elisabeth said. Closing her eyes, wishing for sleep again, she pulled Margaret tighter. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  “If he doesn’t have it, can you ask him what’s taking so long?”

  “I’m not going down there right now. I’m not meeting him.”

  “But Mr. Glaser—”

  “He’ll leave his deliveries on the landing strip,” Elisabeth said. “He doesn’t need any help.”

  And Elisabeth didn’t want to give it. Walter Glaser was nice enough—nice, though always in a hurry—but there were few things that seemed less appealing right now than stepping out of bed, getting dressed, and meeting someone, anyone, on the landing strip at five fifteen in the morning. But Margaret wouldn’t let it go.

  “Please,” she said, “please,” and she wiggled out of Elisabeth’s arms. Margaret knelt, bouncing lightly in front of her. “I need the book for my lessons,” she said. “I have a lesson next week I need it for.”

  “Which lesson?”

  But Margaret didn’t hear the question. “Please ask him what’s taking so long, Mama. Please. Mama—”

  “If he doesn’t have it, he doesn’t have it.”

  “But you can ask him why.”

  “He’s probably already left.”

  Margaret hopped off the bed and pulled a curtain aside from the nearest window. “He’s still there,” she said. “I can see the tip of his tail fin over Mr. Wallis’ house.”

  Elisabeth was pushing the sheets away from her legs.

  “Mama, please,” Margaret said, bouncing on her toes. “Mama—”

  “Let me think about it,” she said, but they both knew that this was code for Okay, okay. I’ll do it. If she took her time going to the bathroom and pulling on her clothes, by then Mr. Glaser really would be gone. Raising children, and Margaret in particular, was partly a question of winning battles by sleight of hand, and at times Elisabeth could be masterful in that respect. Margaret dove onto the bed.

  “Thank you, Mama,” she said, beaming. “I’m so obliged.”

  * * *

  —

  Elisabeth dressed, fed the dog, did her business in the outhouse. Then she headed for the landing strip. Tanacross shined in the morning light, the sun already high and hot in the sky. About twenty-five homes comprised the town, each of them squat and square, single story, their walls built from the hewn trunks of pine and hemlock trees. There were no paved roads in Tanacross, only roads made of dirt, and these were as hard as rock in the winter but almost liquid in the summer. Elisabeth moved quickly, her Oxfords sucking against the mud. She walked with her head down, both hands pulling her cardigan up and over her chin and nose. The summers in Tanacross were filled with swarms of mosquitoes unlike anything she had seen in Pennsylvania. Here, the insects flew in bunches as dense as floating ink. In the summertime, it was always best to move quickly and dress in layers. Today Elisabeth wore a pair of wide-leg slacks and a plain cotton blouse beneath her cardigan.

  The landing strip lay on the north side of town. It seemed that everyone was still asleep, everyone except for Henry Isaac and his grandfather, who were splitting wood in front of their home. Though Henry was strong and young—twenty-nine, two years younger than Elisabeth—his grandfather was doing all the chopping. Henry just stacked the pieces of wood. Both of them nodded and smiled as Elisabeth approached, and Elisabeth did the same.

  “Why aren’t you the one chopping?” she said, pausing in the road a few feet away.

  Henry threw up his hands. “He insisted. I couldn’t stop him.”

  “Lies,” Elisabeth said, and she smiled again. “Tell ch’enděddh’ he’s got a lazy grandson.”

  Chuckling, Henry turned to Mr. Isaac and said a few words in their native Athabaskan. Mr. Isaac laughed, speaking quickly in response, too quickly for Elisabeth’s meager understanding. Henry turned back to her.

  “He says if it wasn’t for lazy grandsons and all the extra work they make, he’d probably be dead.”

  Elisabeth laughed. “Fair enough,” she said, and she started walking again. “Naa su’eg’ęh, both of you.”

  She knew that wasn’t quite the right phrase. She had told them Good luck, or something to that effect, an expression as close to Have a good morning as she could manage. But even if she was far from the point, Henry and Mr. Isaac didn’t seem to hold that against her.

  “Naa su’eg’ęh,” Mr. Isaac said, nodding and smiling. Then he raised the ax once more.

  Twenty minutes had passed since Mr. Glaser arrived, and Elisabeth had every hope that he would already be on his way out of town. He wasn’t airborne yet—she would have heard the plane taking off—but, as she turned the corner and approached the landing strip, she felt certain that she would hear the first catch and clunk of the plane’s engine, and a minute after that Mr. Glaser would be gone.

  But when she stepped onto the gravel runway, Elisabeth found that it wasn’t Mr. Glaser who had landed. About two hundred feet down the landing strip stood an unfamiliar plane, its nose slightly crooked, its front left wheel resting in the grass. Equal parts white and canary yellow, the plane resembled most others that Elisabeth had seen in the Alaskan bush, except for one detail: Painted to the left of the propeller was a black-and-white German Balkenkreuz, which stood out like a mole on the side of someone’s nose. The plane’s wings stretched across the top of the fuselage like a huge rounded paddle and, directly in the center, just above the cockpit’s windshield, a man sat with his knees pulled up against his chest.

  For a moment, Elisabeth thought that he was fixing something—tightening a bolt, adjusting a panel, aligning this or that. No matter the season, the conditions in Alaska were tough on planes, and she had seen Mr. Glaser fix such things in the past, sometimes with the help of Teddy Granger, a local who had briefly served as a mechanic in the army.

  But this man was just sitting there, motionless, his back turned toward her. He was staring at the trees that lined the landing strip, woods as dense as the cornstalks that had once encircled Elisabeth’s home. He didn’t notice her approaching. A haze of mosquitoes flickered around his head, but he didn’t seem to notice that either.

  “Good morning,” Elisabeth said, and she came to a stop a few yards from the plane.

  The man jolted, sitting straighter. Then he turned his head and gazed over his shoulder. His eyes were wide and dazed.

  “Hello,” he said. “Oh my goodness. Hello.” His voice was a peculiar blend of German and British accents, quick and sharp with the consonants, slow and soft with the vowels. He pushed himself to his feet and stood staring at her from atop his plane. “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you walking up.” He flashed a nervous smile. “My apologies.”

  For the most part, he looked normal enough. Mid-forties. Tall and rather slender. He wore a plain white button-up shirt, brown slacks, black suspenders, knee-high boots. He parted his hair to the right with his bangs swe
pt up in a wave, a match for the neat, curving moustache that bent across his face. Elisabeth could tell that he had once been very good-looking. He certainly wasn’t ugly in his middle age; it was just that his cheeks and nose were too pointed, too bony, though it was easy to imagine how he might have looked as a softer, younger man. As it was, from his angle high above her, the man owned a certain look of intensity that wasn’t especially inviting. He reminded Elisabeth of a falcon or an eagle. Somehow, even as he smiled, he seemed to scowl.

  “I’m sorry I startled you,” Elisabeth said.

  “No, no,” the man told her. “That’s all right. I’m fine. That’s quite all right.”

  An awkward second passed between them. Still smiling, the man stared at Elisabeth as if waking from a trance. She wondered if he had been drinking.

  “I’m Elisabeth Pfautz,” she said.

  Cordially, the man bowed his head and lowered his eyes. “Alfred Seidel,” he said. “Very pleased to meet you, Mrs. Pfautz.”

  She took a single step forward. “What were you looking at?” Elisabeth turned to the woods, half expecting to see the hulking shadow of a moose or a caribou. But there were only trees—ragged, tired trees—endless as ever. Tanacross was the largest settlement for a hundred miles.

  Alfred lowered his eyes again, bashfully. “I was just looking at . . .” he began, and paused for a second, “oh, just everything.” He started walking down the spine of the plane.

  “Everything?”

  “Yes, you know,” he said, gesturing with one hand, “all of it. The woods. The bush. All the beautiful world.” He hopped to the ground, facing her now. His eyes were an iridescent shade of blue, and they narrowed at her as he walked a few steps forward. “Did you say your name is Pfautz?”

  “I did.”

  Alfred set his hands on his hips. “You’re a German, then?”

  “Pfautz is my husband’s name,” Elisabeth said, “but yes, I’m German, at least by stock. My father was from Hamburg, and my mother was from Bremen.”